The Time I Totally Lost It

“Today’s parents are facing more intense stress, public scrutiny, impossible standards, and technological confusion than ever before. And it’s been building for decades…”
(ScreamFree Parenting 10th Anniversary Edition, p7)

In the ten years since our first ScreamFree Parenting book came out, the world has changed dramatically, especially in terms of parenting.

In the first few pages of the new Revised & Updated Edition, which came out yesterday, I tell a dramatic story of me screaming, in a terrifying way, at my daughter Hannah when she was just months old. Her struggle with colic was legendary that first year, and my time as a stay-at-home dad that year was quite the baptism by fire. That fateful day, I lost it in a way that would change me forever.

If that happened today, I might be tempted with an entirely new option. Parents around the world are using mobile screens to soothe babies and toddlers with tantalizing images.

Are these screens a Godsend I could’ve used back then? Or are they, instead, an entirely new long-term nightmare couched in a short-term distracting solution?